Inculcative address, commercial worldbuilding, and transmedia economy in the children’s franchise Bamse

ABSTRACT

Capitalist enterprises continuously push consumption of commercial products on children, for instance in the form of transmedial worlds in which multiple stories can play out across media and over time. The popular Swedish children’s franchise Bamse has undergone an obvious capitalist expansion over time, with more and more commodities being made available for purchase. At the same time the brand continues to be promoted as a force for spreading good values and thus provides a valuable service to its audience of Swedish children. The present article explores, through a combination of paratextual analysis and political economy, how these inculcative and commercial goals coexist in a tense but seemingly functional configuration.

KEYWORDS:

• Cinema/Film
• comics and animation
• franchising
• political economy of communication
• Scandinavia
• youth and media
• transmedia
• paratext

The deep ties between children’s culture and capitalism are hardly a novel research topic. Still, capitalist enterprises continue to push consumption of commercial products on children (Kapur, 2005, Bainbridge, 2010, Stevens and St John, 2020). One prominent expression of this effort is the building of transmedial worlds, fictional worlds in which multiple stories can play out across media and over time. These worlds can take the form of franchises, with the central principle that each product is a commodity that promotes other commodities and, in turn, is promoted by them (Kapur, 2005, Meehan, 2015). But transmedial worlds are not just market-driven. They are also about interrelated texts and their themes, values, and narratives (Proctor & Freeman, 2016). This means that a flexible approach is beneficial for studying transmedial worlds, one that dips into both political economy and textual analysis (Hardy, 2011, Wasko, 2014, 2018). The former helps with conceptualizing media ownership while the latter provides insight into how capitalist imperatives drive the worldbuilding through the ordering of textual space (Hardy, 2011; see also Kapur, 2005).

The popular Swedish franchise Bamse, which produces superhero fiction for children, first debuted in 1966 in animated short films on Swedish public television and a half-page comic strip in a weekly magazine. Since then, he and his friends have entertained and inculcated Swedish children through many different media and commodities – comic books, TV films, toys, books, games, apparel, a theme park, social media, etc. Bamse is a household name in Sweden and has been transmedial from the very beginning. A world populated by familiar characters, containing recognizable places, and representing key values has gradually been built up around the Bamse brand. In fact, an inclusive, inculcative mode of address – with a clear aim to inculcate pro-social values and behavior in children – partly defines the brand. In 2014 Bamse was made into an animated feature film and screened in cinemas. That film, Bamse and the City of Thieves (Ryltenius, 2014), as well as its two sequels, Bamse and the Witch’s Daughter (Blom & Ryltenius, 2016) and Bamse and the Thunderbell (Ryltenius, 2018), delimit this study, although the focus lies on the multiple paratexts that surround and engage with the films.

Few studies have been devoted to Bamse, and they deal with the comic books. Examples are Magnusson’s (2003, 2005) historical project on the narration and publication of Swedish children’s comics, Larsson’s (2014) study of power relations between Bamse characters in relation to different functions of the Swedish welfare state, and Abalo and Nilsson’s (2021) study of how the topics of source criticism and media literacy are dealt with in a special issue of the Bamse comic. The present article looks beyond the single medium of comic books and considers Bamse’s configuration as a transmedial world with commercially thriving branches stretching across multiple forms of media and commodities. In such a context, Bamse’s repeatedly expressed values – social responsibility, kindness, education, social justice – are potentially challenged by a capitalist production and circulation framework that continuously draws children into the market as consumers (see Kapur, 2005, p. 110). Several studies within political economy have provided knowledge about the commercial imperatives of franchises aimed at children, including Kapur’s (2005) historical study of the public discourse on childhood, Wasko’s (2001) study of the Disney company, and Kackman’s (2008) historical study of Hopalong Cassidy and his prominent role in children’s consumer culture of the 1940s and 1950s. Also, previous children’s media industries research has taught us that children’s media has historically been subject to powerful globalizing forces, and with the multiplication of platforms in recent media developments has come a period of strong vertically integrated transnational ownership (Potter and Steemers, 2017). According to Steemers (2016), however, too little is known about children’s media production in communities beyond the US and other English-speaking territories, making the present study a relevant contribution to the research. The present study builds on these to further the understanding of children’s transmedia franchises more generally and Bamse specifically.

Bamse has undergone a capitalist expansion over time, with more and more commodities being made available for purchase (see Magnusson, 2003), making it more and more similar to internationally known children’s franchises like Paw Patrol (2013-), SpongeBob SquarePants (1999-), Peppa Pig (2004-), and Bluey (2018-). At the same time the brand continues to be promoted as a force for spreading good values and thus provides a valuable service to its audience of children. The aim of this article is to explore how these inculcative and commercial goals coexist in a seemingly functional, but tense, configuration, or what Proctor and Freeman (2016) call a transmedia economy where commerce and art are entangled with each other.

Transmedia economy

Building fictional worlds is work that any narrative does (Ryan, 2013). With that idea in mind, Freeman (2017) asserts that “media texts do not merely forge stories or characters; they build worlds in the service of forging characters and stories” (93). However, worldbuilding is not only a question of narrative, of media texts, but also of economics and the imperative that to fully experience a transmedial world one must consume more and more commodities derived from that world (see Jenkins, 2006, Freeman, 2017). The capitalist imperatives behind transmedial worlds are comparable to what Kackman (2008) identifies as a process of “ongoing creation of value through extending the reach of an intellectual property” (79), which is crucial for companies operating in the competitive media market.

Being largely set in a fantastical world, Bamse meshes well with the concept of worldbuilding. In her history of Swedish comic books for children, Magnusson (2005) notes how the environment in the Bamse comics is changeable and expandable, which rhymes well with the expansion across multiple types of media and the building of the Bamse storyworld over time. However, there are recognizable settings that are reused over time and across media, and recurring characters also maintain the transmedial world. A familiar aesthetic is also significant, such as the use of specific shapes, colors, and music. Finally, an inculcative mode of address is apparent across Bamse’s many media extensions, from comics and games to films. This means that the material addresses viewers/readers with an implied intention to shape their development. This is supported by Magnusson (2005), who has shown that the Bamse comics are committed to careful and unambiguous narration, with clear images set in a logical sequence, and verbal components that clarify the narration. When studying how a text addresses its viewer/reader, aesthetic features are of key importance (Jansson, 2007, Jansson, 2009).

This article examines paratextual materials and the three Bamse films to which they are connected. These include ads and contests appearing in comic books and Instagram posts, trailers, board games, posters, and an official website. I have examined all issues of the main comic book, Bamse – The World’s Strongest Bear, from 2013 to 2020, and the official Instagram account, bamse_varldens_starkaste_bjorn, since its creation on August 18, 2014. There is one poster for each film, although the poster images are also reused for DVD covers and in some ads. There is one teaser and one full trailer for each film, and these have been accessed through production company Sluggerfilm’s official Vimeo account (Sluggerfilm, 2013a, 2013b, 2016a, 2016b, 2018a, 2018b). There is one licensed board game for each film, all of which are produced by Egmont Kärnan. Together, these texts create a complex network of meanings (Ruppel, 2012), and to make sense of that network this article performs a paratextual analysis informed by theories of transmedia worldbuilding and political economy.

Like Hackley and Hackley (2019), I argue that the theoretical notion of the paratext articulates the interconnectedness of different media, and it is especially useful when considering a worldbuilding project like Bamse. Although Genette’s work (Genette, 1997) on paratexts, and not least his ideas about paratexts as sites of transaction, is important, this article draws on later theoretical work making less use of Genette’s hierarchical understanding of the relationship between texts and paratexts (see Gray, 2010; Hackley & Hackley, 2019; Aronczyk, 2017). Paratexts, I will show, do more than just offer a way of preparing the way for a primary text. They are not simply promotional, but signify an expansion of the realm in which meaning can be made (Aronczyk, 2017), and according to Gray (2010), “paratextual study not only promises to tell us how a text creates meaning for its consumers; it also promises to tell us how a text creates meaning in popular culture and society more generally” (p. 26). This is further supported by Meehan’s (2015) political economy-based study of the commercial intertexts of Batman (1989), where she argues that licensed products and associated media are more than just derivatives of a main text. They are, in fact, central to that text’s appeal and commercial success (see also Kackman, 2008). Understanding the role of such texts thus seems crucial. This article also adopts a political economy approach, which, according to Meehan (2007) “contextualizes the objects and practices under study within the larger industrial systems that originate them” (p. 161). Following Hardy’s (2014) assertion that political economists explore how ownership matters, the following section expands on the corporate context that produces Bamse.

The Bamse business

The Bamse brand is controlled by the company Bamse Förlaget AB (hereafter referred to as the Bamse Company), run by Bamse creator Rune Andréasson’s two sons, Dan and Ola Andréasson, through the wealth management firm DanOla AB. The company manages all licenses, approves all products, and determines which companies may use the brand. Among those companies, the Egmont Media Group, a commercial foundation,¹ is the largest licensee, standing for over half of the total profits (Utterström, 2014). Egmont started out as a print publishing company in 1878 but has developed into one of Scandinavia’s leading media companies. It has published Bamse – The World’s Strongest Bear since 1990,² and it is likely not an accident that its philanthropic values align with Bamse’s. According to Egmont, all profits are either reinvested in the foundation to develop media or donated to philanthropic efforts, primarily sustainable education initiatives, that “help children and young people at risk” (Egmont., n.d.com). The foundation consists of six main pillars, each representing the business sectors TV, Magazines, Film, Books, Games, and E-commerce. As a result, Egmont, much like multinational corporations such as Disney or Warner Bros. Discovery, maintains many of the components needed to create and nurture transmedia franchises without outsourcing production to potential competitors. This inevitably generates more business for the company as a whole and thus increases profits (see Meehan, 2015).

For the purposes of this article, two of the commercial pillars are relevant. The first, Storyhouse Egmont (called Egmont Publishing until the end of 2020), focuses on comic books and magazines, publishing children’s magazines in 26 countries (Egmont, 2021b). It also provides digital marketing services, and includes several e-commerce companies as well as the Swedish brand Kärnan, under which it produces board games and jigsaw puzzles. The second pillar, Nordisk Film, which merged with Egmont in 1992, produces and distributes films and owns cinemas across Scandinavia. It also invests in computer and video gaming and acts as distributor for Sony PlayStation in the Nordic and Baltic countries (Egmont, n.d..). Nordisk Film co-produced, together with independent company Sluggerfilm, and distributed the Bamse films.

Licensing is the practice of spreading a product beyond a single producer or manufacturer (Freeman, 2017, Jenkins, 2006), and in the case of Bamse we can see it in the proliferation of Bamse commodities such as clothing, toys, shampoo, toothpaste, diapers, and ice cream. The spread of licensed products across multiple media and markets has led to a broadening of Bamse’s fictional world, provides many entry points and opportunities for cross-promotion, and generally guarantees a secondary source of income while simultaneously acting as a form of promotion (see Meehan, 2015). However, licensing arrangements precede production and place restrictions on what producers can do with a product, making it difficult to change anything beyond what is already in the primary text (Hills, 2016). In the case of Bamse, the brand comes with certain constraints, originally promoted by creator Rune Andréasson and now more or less enforced by the Bamse Company. These take the form of sanctioned themes in the stories – fostering good behavior, education, a positive view of science – and stated values and ideals, such as humanism (Sjöberg, 2015, Utterström, 2014). In interviews, the brand owners carefully uphold such values as key to the brand’s success, and they also state that there are products that will never be approved for licensed use, such as food, candy, and ice cream (Wisterberg, 2015). Interestingly, a licensed Bamse ice cream became available in stores in 2019 and you can buy branded food and candy when you visit the theme park Bamse’s World. Still, the Bamse films are a case of commercial filmmaking, characterized by a logic of minimizing production costs and maximizing profit. We can see this, for instance, in the production choice to outsource the animation of the films to BV Animation Studio in Taiwan, a practice that feeds the consumer economy of affluent nations (Kapur, 2005) and confirms Wasko’s and Meehan’s (2013) argument that “media products are simultaneously artifacts and commodities […] that present a vision for interpretation and an ideology for consumption” (p. 153).

It is also likely that Bamse’s proven potential to successfully cross over multiple forms of media and ancillary markets played a part in the choice to make the films. Media conglomerates tend to reduce risk by spreading projects across various subsidiaries (Kapur, 2005, p. 149), as well as by producing stories based on familiar concepts. Bamse, having been transmedial from the very beginning thus seems like a safe bet for producers. Interestingly, Bamse seems to be somewhat of an exception to the rule that producing media content for children in determined smaller geographical sectors is rarely financially rewarding (Potter & Steemers, 2017, Steemers, 2017). Arguably, extending a brand’s reach through other media and consumer products is a way of mitigating such limitations.

The Bamse films appeared in a time of increasing consumer choice and fragmentation of viewing habits. In their biennial report Little Kids & Media, the Swedish Media Council (2017) concludes that not only has media viewing among small children become more fragmented across channels, programs, and films, but the titles they consume stretch far beyond television and film and include a multitude of products. Children are offered entire concepts, and transmedial marketing is found in almost all media content geared toward the youngest children. However, concepts, as described here, or franchising and transmedia storytelling for that matter, can also be thought of as efforts to streamline fragmented parts. As Boni (2017) argues, the tendency to describe the contemporary media landscape in terms of fragmentation is complemented by a “ubiquitous tendency toward the gathering of dispersed parts” (pp. 9–10), which is made visible in the common practices of serialization and franchising. A transmedial and interdisciplinary approach is needed to further nuance the understanding of such media properties.

The Bamse brand is managed under a traditional licensing model, with different license holders doing their own things under the authorial supervision of the brand owners. Despite such oversight, Bamse does not completely conform to the general gradual development in recent years toward integration and streamlining of fragmented parts among entertainment properties (see Proctor & Freeman, 2016, Boni, 2017). This motivates thinking about Bamse in terms of transmedia worldbuilding.

Worldbuilding

Exploration

Exhortations to explore the transmedial world of Bamse figure prominently in the mode of address in the promotional paratexts. One common strategy is to arrange contests involving licensed tie-in products. The very first Instagram post promoting The Witch’s Daughter (Bamse världens starkaste björn, 2016b), presents an image of five different tie-in products that you can win if you visit Bamse’s official website (bamse.se) and enter a contest. Beside the image in the post there is a brief synopsis of the film’s plot and a notification of the premiere date. While contests occasionally occur in Instagram posts (Bamse världens starkaste björn, 2017; 2020), it is a recurring practice for ads in the comic books (see 14, 2013; 16, 2013; 17/18, 2013; 2, 2014; 19/20, 2016; 18, 2018; 4/5, 2019; 18, 2019), where contests for winning merchandise have been common since the 1970s (Magnusson 2005). On the one hand, then, these contests function as ads for the film by showcasing film-themed merchandise and mentioning the film’s plot and premiere date, but on the other hand they also provide a cue to visit a website and thereby extend the visit to the transmedial world. The website is also full of ads and purchase opportunities, as well as information resources about the world of Bamse,³ and it is important to note that the cue to visit the site does not come with a specific URL. One must navigate through the site to find the contest, and the link thus promotes exploration, which is in line with many transmedia narratives (Ojeda et al., 2019).

The contest ads, like ads in general, function as sites of transaction (see Genette, 1997) that provide an opportunity to step further inside or to turn back, and they are legitimated by an authorial voice that encourages us to visit places where purchases can be made. They set up connections not only to the film being promoted but also potentially far beyond, since they open up the world of Bamse by linking to sites that can take you through even more transactions. This shows how paratextual advertising enables “consumption by inserting brands into media content across the many communication platforms that facilitate participatory, collaborative and fluid consumption, thus increasing brand salience and driving engagement” (Hackley & Hackley, 2019). However, as a children’s franchise, Bamse calls for a problematization of this argument, especially when it comes to collaboration and participation, since these tend to be regulated by parents.⁴ Also, even if the contests allow for individual interaction with the storyworld through the technology of the website, there is little participation in play, if by that we refer to readers’ ability to push the resources of a text in unsanctioned directions. What the ads and contests do is to cultivate the brand by promoting ways of exploring the storyworld; however, to explore it fully you must also spend money.

Invoking the history of the world

An important building block for constructing any transmedial world is the use of familiar characters across texts and media. Having characters appear in numerous iterations is a way of tying a storyworld together (Freeman, 2017), and Bamse has a set of characters who appear in the films as well as throughout the paratexts. The character-focused posters for the three films are prime examples of this. The characters are recognizable cultural icons that connect the posters to the films as well as to the larger storyworld and the stories already told. Being so character-focused, the posters indicate a marketing strategy where familiarity is a key device and is seen to carry significant value.

The posters also invoke what has come before through short enticing statements. They exclaim “In cinemas for the first time” (poster for City of Thieves) or “A new cinematic adventure with Bamse” (poster for Witch’s Daughter), thereby promoting the films as part of a longer history of Bamse stories set in a common transmedial world. Such promotional statements address viewers already familiar with Bamse, and they aim to convince them to visit the cinema where access is granted if payment is offered. They are, in other words, seeking to emphasize the value of the film by promoting it as both unique and as a continuation of the worldbuilding.

History is also present in the trailers in that they emphasize an established storyworld, playing on recognition as a means of promotion. One device is the narrator’s use of promotional statements like those on the posters, which frame the films as continuations of something already well established. Another device that brings the past to life is the musical score. All the trailers include snippets of the classic Bamse musical theme, popularized in the animated shorts produced in the 1970s and 1980s. The theme might not be familiar to the youngest viewers, but it certainly is to many parents, for whom it can carry much sentimental value. Using the musical theme here sets up an intertextual link to older media content thought to retain a certain residual value (Jenkins, Ford, & Green, 2013), and nostalgically flirting with that content can enable some of that value to carry over to the new films.

Narrative extensions

In the trailers, we cross the threshold into narrative, much more so than in the other promotional materials. However, being promotional, the trailers “construct a narrative time-space that differs from (and creates desire for) the fictive world of the film itself” (Kernan, 2004, p. 10). Aside from their invocation of history, the trailers are closely aligned overall with the films’ narratives and work to promote them and only them, though with one exception. In the paratexts surrounding Witch’s Daughter, an effort was obviously made to establish a new character, Lova, who is alluded to in the film’s title. She not only appeared in ads, in Instagram posts, and on different film-themed commodities, but was also given stories of her own in the comic books, was featured in the licensed board game, and became part of the touring live event Bamse and Lova Sing & Dance. Lova was made into a kind of hub in a web of consumption, with several commodities and media texts being braided together in a commercially designed, coherent product image (see Freeman, 2014).

Regarding extending narrative across media, a typical strategy in transmedia entertainment (Freeman, 2014, Proctor & Freeman, 2016, Jenkins, 2006, Ryan, 2014), Bamse stands out as quite limited. Few of the connections discussed in this article are of a narrative nature. The licensed board games is one exception. While all three games are linked to their respective film and other paratexts through characters, environments, and themes, they also provide playable narratives that are adapted from the films’ plots, confirming Booth’s (2016) argument that “different games for different franchises must both fit into the narrative imaginings of that story world/universe and create unique game play situations to support and augment player understandings of that universe” (p. 648). In other words, they connect to the storyworld and extend the narratives, but they do so according to the affordances of the board game medium. The gameplay is straightforward, unsurprisingly as the games target children, and the narratives extend from key moments in the films. Interestingly, The Gold Hunt Game (Kärnan, 2016) has the players rather than the villains look for gold and could thus be said to go against the values of the Bamse storyworld, where gold and money are traditionally presented as unimportant or even disregarded entirely. Bamse does have a history of anti-capitalist sentiments, especially in stories involving the villain of Witch’s Daughter/The Gold Hunt Game, the greedy Krösus Sork, who is always in conflict with Bamse’s pro-social values. The material here does not support this, as the game explicitly promotes the importance of gold, thereby exemplifying the apparent difficulty the franchise sometimes seems to have to reconcile its values and its commercial ambitions.

A depoliticized inculcative mode of address

Efforts to present good role models to young audiences have permeated Swedish children’s films since the 1940s, and are based on a wish to steer children in the right social and mental direction through entertainment (Jansson, 2007, Jansson, 2009). This is also apparent in the transmedial world of Bamse, where each of the three main characters represents a particular value or two. Bamse is kind and always helps others, Lille Skutt embodies the idea of overcoming your fears, and Skalman is smart and rational.

Over time, other characters have been the focal points of stories, as in Witch’s Daughter, where the action is driven more by children in general and the new character Lova in particular. In the film, the children are not isolated from the surrounding world, but are given agency and voice. Lova is the clearest example, in that she struggles against her mother’s overprotectiveness and mistrust of others. Also, when all the adults disappear, the children step up, and by working together they succeed in their struggle against the gold-seeking villains of the story. This struggle is also presented in the film’s trailer, where the images are accompanied by the voice-over narrator saying “ … where all our friends must pull together in order to save The Hills … from a flood” (my italics) (Sluggerfilm, 2016b). As in most Bamse stories, a verbal narrator is of key relevance for how viewers/readers are addressed. In the comic books, this overt narrator is realized through text boxes or characters’ direct address, and is arguably an expression of authorial representation. The films are committed to careful and unambiguous narration, where clear images are set in a logical sequence and further clarified by verbal components (see Magnusson, 2005). The address is inclusive (“our”) and inculcative in how it emphasizes the importance of collaboration for success.

This key sequence, presented in both the film and the trailer, is not just narratively significant, but is also thematically important, in that it celebrates the self-reliant child. The children are shown as able to fend for themselves in the absence of adults, which Kapur (2005) argues is a recurring theme in the children’s film. The depiction of children as a collective of collaborators, as opposed to the individual child working alone, is a clear difference between Witch’s Daughter and children’s films like those Kapur analyzes, and the mode of address mentioned here is in line with Bamse’s transmedial values, although the absence of adults can still be seen as an indicator of the kind of discourse that Kapur (2005) refers to.

Interestingly, this is the only example of inculcative address in the trailers of the three films. Their mode of address is, however, generally inclusive, thanks to the voice-over narrator’s continuous use of expressions such as “we”, “our”, and “join us”, which is typical of Bamse according to Magnusson (2003). Together with the hyperbolic statements about the films’ uniqueness, the inclusivity is connected to a promotional discourse. Hyperbolic address is common to trailers and builds expectations about the film as a spectacle (Kernan, 2004). The trailers attempt to create engagement through experiential pleasure (see Kernan, 2004) and by implicitly or explicitly asking the viewer to reciprocate by buying a ticket to see the film, which makes it a hollow kind of engagement designed to generate financial returns rather than to foster meaningful participation (see Jenkins, Ford, & Green, 2013).

The films themselves do present an inculcative mode of address tied to pro-social values that have long been expressed in stories taking place in Bamse’s transmedial world (see Magnusson, 2005). The central theme of City of Thieves is arguably the importance of friendship, a theme that also links the film to the wider Bamse storyworld where this theme has been explored for decades. It even continues to have a presence in the subsequent films, albeit to a lesser degree. Witch’s Daughter is about inclusion, solidarity, and trust, as opposed to greed, exclusion, and prejudice, whereas Thunderbell thematizes the importance of being true to oneself and also contains an environmental theme. The values being expressed in the films, and arguably also in the contemporary comic books, lack political contextualization. This is a clear difference from many Bamse stories from the 1970s, when the sociopolitical context called for ideological and political awareness, and when the comic book’s voice was more clearly leftist and could speak, for instance, about distribution politics or against the Vietnam war. According to brand owner Ola Andréasson, Bamse was political when it began because everything was political in the 1970s, but it is different now, with less polarization. Bamse is simply a humanist who looks out for the weak (Utterström, 2014). Another possible explanation of this development is that creator Rune Andréasson, who continuously inserted explicit political messages into the comic book, had sole control over the product until 1990, when he stepped back in favor of an editorial board who began to develop Bamse into a truly branded concept (see Magnusson, 2003, 2005).

There are also a few examples of comic book contests where an inculcative mode of address is present. A back cover presents a contest to win cinema tickets to City of Thieves or a copy of the licensed board game (no. 16, 2013). It describes the film as “an adventure film about friendship and about how easy it is to become mean if you are not allowed to participate.” While implicitly inculcative, the statement clearly avoids specificity in favor of a general and universally recognizable “truth.” Another issue (no. 4/5, 2019) presents a contest where readers can win the book-version of Thunderbell if they send in their “best piece of environmental advice.” Another text in the ad states: “In the hunt for the Thunderbells, Bamse must learn something important: that just being yourself takes you much further than you might think.” Almost the same sentence appears in an earlier ad (no. 17, 2018) for the same film, and if it had been used more in the promotional material across media, it might have worked as a tagline for the film and thereby helped to form an interpretive community (see Gray, 2010) around the film. Again, no contextualization is present in the material. The environmental theme, for instance, is not connected to a societal problem. Instead, it is reduced to what the individual reader can do, something that is true of the film as well. The environmental theme is also transferred to the licensed board game, creating a circular referentiality where one product refers to several others recursively (see Ruppel, 2012). Interestingly, a clear case of inculcative address can be found here (and in the licensed games connected to the other two films), as the game rules state that “ … the most important things are not money and gold, because nature itself is the treasure. A treasure more valuable than all the gold in the world!” (Kärnan, 2018). Addressing the players in this way is in line with the Bamse brand and the larger transmedial world. Any contextualization and politicization in the inculcative address is clearly lacking overall in the analyzed material.

Conclusions

An Instagram post (Bamse världens starkaste björn, 2022) promoting issue (5/6, 2022) of the comic book presents two panels where the greedy capitalist Krösus exclaims “Play?!” “Children should not play.” “They should shop!” “Otherwise, I won’t earn any money from them.” The image is accompanied by the text: “Bamse no. 5/6 is in stores on Thursday. You can buy it then! ;)” There is an implied emphasis on the word “buy” here that ostensibly conflates Krösus with Storyhouse Egmont, but the wink at the end of the sentence is probably meant to cue the statement as ironic and playful. However, the post is an ad that actually does prompt readers to buy the issue, so the irony seems forced. It ends up not being self-deprecating, and instead effectively illustrates the tensions running through the Bamse material.

On the one hand Bamse is caught up in the general process of marketization and the continuously expanding consumer culture. On the other hand, there seems to be some resistance against fully embracing the commercialism that defines much of children’s culture. This tension is perhaps not unique to Bamse if we make a comparison with other children’s franchises, such as the UK’s Peppa Pig or Australia’s Bluey – both of which promote pro-social values while pushing continuous lines of consumer products – but I would argue that it is more explicit. Also, Bamse is largely national in scope, or at least limited to the Nordic countries, whereas the mentioned examples are global in their reach. Bamse’s economic sustainability is therefore interesting (c.f. Steemers, 2016, 2017, Potter & Steemers, 2017). An avenue for further research could be to investigate Bamse’s transmedial beginnings and trace its development, because it is reasonable that we could find a part of the explanation for its success in its long history and cross-generational appeal. The tensions between the commercial logics of the franchise and the pro-social values in Bamse are derived from the socially and politically conscious legacy of creator Rune Andréasson and the proven, and expected, inculcative mode of address, which also connects to the traditions and conventions of Swedish children’s film (and culture). The inculcative intentions are deeply entrenched in the Bamse brand and are therefore difficult to dismiss, as they implicitly contain audience expectations.

The Bamse brand is represented by its products and its philosophy (see Wasko, 2001). The philosophy is manifested through an inculcative mode of address in some, but not all, products, through sporadic brand-cultivation efforts by the license holders, and in the various texts and paratexts that reproduce it. The commercial aims are rationalized by the supposedly “good” work that Bamse does, but perhaps that is just as much a question of brand legacy as it is about the actual work done today.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Johan Nilsson

Johan Nilsson is a senior lecturer in Media and Communication Studies at Örebro University in Sweden. He has published on the topics of American film satire, intermediality, and transmedia.

Notes

1. The company’s consolidated revenue amounted to approximately EUR 2 billion in 2021 (Egmont, 2021a).

2. Since the start several new titles have been added. These include Bamses äventyr [Bamse’s Adventures, 2006-], Bamse för de yngsta [Bamse for the Youngest Children, 2010-], Bamse – kul att lära [Bamse – Fun to Learn, 2012-], Nalle-Majamagasinet [2019-] and various special issues.

3. The website is maintained by Storyhouse Egmont and only promotes material under Egmont’s license.

4. For instance, the comic book regularly promotes the Bamse Instagram account, but is careful to tell children to ask their parents to follow the account.